Noun

Related terms

A syllabary is a set of written symbols that
represent (or approximate) syllables, which make up
words. A symbol in a
syllabary typically represents an optional consonant sound followed by a
vowel sound.

Languages using syllabaries

Languages that use syllabic
writing include Mycenaean Greek
(Linear
B), the Native American language Cherokee,
the African language Vai,
the English-based creole
languageNdyuka (the Afaka
script), Yi language in
China, the
Nü
Shu syllabary for Yao people,
China, and
the ancient Filipino script Alibata. The
Chinese,
Cuneiform,
and Maya
scripts are largely syllabic in nature, although based on
logograms. They are
therefore sometimes referred to as logosyllabic. The Japanese
language uses two syllabaries together called kana, namely hiragana and katakana (developed around 700
AD). They are mainly used to write some native words and
grammatical elements, as well as foreign words, e.g. hotel is
written with three kana, ホテル (ho-te-ru), in Japanese. Because
Japanese uses a lot of CV (consonant + vowel) syllables, a
syllabary is well suited to write the language. As in many
syllabaries, however, vowel sequences and final consonants are
written with separate glyphs, so that both atta and kaita are
written with three kana: あった (a-t-ta) and かいた (ka-i-ta). It is
therefore sometimes called a moraic
writing system.

Difference between an abugida and a syllabary

Indian
languages and Ethiopian
languages have a type of alphabet called an abugida or alphasyllabary. These
are sometimes mistaken for syllabaries, but unlike in syllabaries,
all syllables starting with the same consonant are based on the
same symbol, and generally more than one symbol is needed to
represent a syllable. In the 19th century these systems were called
syllabics, a term which has survived in the name of
Canadian Aboriginal syllabics (also an abugida). In a true
syllabary there is no systematic graphic similarity between
phonetically related characters (though some do have graphic
similarity for the vowels). That is, the characters for "ke", "ka",
and "ko" have no similarity to indicate their common "k"-ness (e.g.
hiragana け, か, こ). Compare abugida, where each grapheme typically represents a
syllable but where characters representing related sounds are
similar graphically (typically, a common consonantal base is
annotated in a more or less consistent manner to represent the
vowel in the syllable).

Comparison to English alphabet

The English
language allows complex syllable structures, making it
cumbersome to write English words with a syllabary. A "pure"
syllabary would require a separate glyph for every syllable in
English. Thus one would need separate symbols for "bag," "beg,"
"big," "bog," "bug" ; "bad," "bed," "bid," "bod," "bud," etc.
However, such pure systems are rare. A work-around to this problem,
common to several syllabaries around the world (including English
loanwords in Japanese), is to write an echo vowel, as if the
syllable
coda was a second syllable: ba-gu for "bag", etc. Another
common approach is to simply ignore the coda, so that "bag" would
be written ba. This obviously would not work well for English, but
was done in Mycenean Greek when the root word was two or three
syllables long and the syllable coda was a weak consonant such as n
or s (example: chrysos written as ku-ru-so).